The Bahrain GP made for another challenging weekend for Racing Bulls driver Liam Lawson, leaving him without any points — and several penalties — once again.

The Kiwi has explained that his penalized moves were necessary if he wanted to make up any positions after a DRS issue in qualifying.

Liam Lawson explains his penalized lunges were necessary

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

Liam Lawson’s Bahrain Grand Prix woes kicked off qualifying, when a DRS issue saw him knocked out in Q1 and set to line up on the grid at Sakhir in 17th.

Halfway down the straight on his flying lap, his DRS mechanism shut unexpectedly. The resulting drag cost him roughly half a second and cost him a shot of progressing into Q2.

“The speed’s been there all weekend,” he said to media, including PlanetF1.com, after the race.

“I had a DRS issue in quali, and then just a tough race coming through. I don’t think we’re really lacking.”

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Unfortunately for Lawson, the race proved more challenging than expected, and things were only made all the more difficult by the two penalties he was hit with during the race.

First came a five-second penalty for causing contact with Aston Martin’s Lance Stroll during the safety car period, followed by a 10-second penalty for causing a collision with Nico Hulkenberg when the race went green again.

“From where we were starting, it was going to be hard, but we just got stuck the whole race,” Lawson explained to media.

“It felt like the only way you could overtake was by having a lunge from quite far back.”

That, then, would explain the hail-Mary moves that saw him pushing perhaps beyond the limits of his machinery.

“I need to review the incidents,” he admitted.

“I don’t really remember too much about them. It’s a shame, but we weren’t on for points, anyway.”

The Kiwi racer sounded frustrated in his post-race interviews, particularly because he noted that “the biggest shame was that the car was fast all weekend, the car was fast in quali, the car was fast in the race, especially the last 10 on the soft.

“We’re just coming from so far back.”

The Racing Bulls driver also noted that “it wasn’t as easy as maybe people expected” to overtake, which made every ounce of track position critical to securing a good result.

Still, he admitted that “we were certainly able to move forward and close in on the back end of the points until we got the penalty.”

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